AnonTechie [soylentnews.org] writes:
Modern statistics have made it easier than ever for us to fool ourselves. Scientific results often defy common sense. Sometimes this is because science deals with phenomena that occur on scales we don't experience directly, like evolution over billions of years or molecules that span billionths of meters. Even when it comes to things that happen on scales we're familiar with, scientists often draw counter-intuitive conclusions from subtle patterns in the data. Because these patterns are not obvious, researchers rely on statistics to distinguish the signal from the noise. Without the aid of statistics, it would be difficult to convincingly show that smoking causes cancer, that drugged bees can still find their way home, that hurricanes with female names are deadlier than ones with male names, or that some people have a precognitive sense for porn.
http://www.psmag.com/navigation/nature-and-technology/statistically-significant-studies-arent-necessarily-significant-82832/ [psmag.com]
http://www.pnas.org/content/110/37/15031.full [pnas.org]
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